03-05-2017 Upcoming Event - Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
Date & Time：3 May 2017 （Wednesday）2.30pm-4.30pm
Title： Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes: Colonial Law and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1871-1939
Speaker：Sandy Chong(Phd Candidate from History Department of University of Texas at Austin)
Venue：ICS Seminar Room, 4th Floor, Block B, Institute of Graduate Studies (IPS Building), University of Malaya.
ABSTRACT
The history of Chinese migration to British Malaya has long been narrated as a tale of sojourning men and left-behind wives, of secret society members and indigenous Southeast Asian women with whom Chinese men formed intimate relationships. At the heart of these historical accounts is the presumption of timeless male mobility and female immobility; of men who travelled overseas and women who remained “rooted” in their respective homelands. Between 1870s and 1930s, however, more than a million Chinese women from the south coasts of China arrived on the shores of British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and sex workers. How did they travel, especially at a time when multiple legal barriers tightly controlled Asian mobility into the British Empire? What challenges did they face as they encountered numerous officials and crossed multiple jurisdictions to build new lives in Malaya?
This presentation explores the “forgotten” histories of Chinese female migrants in the Straits Settlements in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It examines the historical connections between the intensification of Chinese female mobility and the institutionalization of colonial migration control as a system of racial and gender exclusion. The talk considers how and why Chinese women were subjected to a different mode of colonial surveillance than their male counterparts, and investigates what these uneven policies reveal about the colonial state’s preoccupation with gender, labor, and border management. Drawing on colonial court cases, oral interviews, alongside immigration records, it illuminates the ways Chinese migrant women simultaneously evaded and engaged with colonial legal institutions that sought to circumscribe their mobility, intimate relations, and livelihood strategies. The presentation revises a longstanding narrative that casts Chinese male sojourners as emblematic of migrations to Southeast Asia; instead, it argues that gender and sexuality are central to our historical understanding of this region’s history of migration.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sandy F. Chang is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in the history of the British Empire in Asia. Her research interests include migration and sex trafficking, gender and sexuality, Chinese diaspora, and inter-Asian connections. Her dissertation, “Across the Nanyang: Gender, Intimate Labor, and Chinese Migrations to British Malaya, 1870-1940,” has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). At UT Austin, she has served as the coordinator for the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality and as a special sections editor for the E3W Journal of Book Reviews.
